opefully the org will have a more phoenix style burn and rise form the ashes renewed and better
As someone who was in Scouts not long before they started imploding from the scandals and now has a kid in Scouts, I really do get the feeling that the modernization they’ve been tackling has been very much akin to this. Just feels like a much healthier organization which isn’t actively trying to pretend its still the 1960s
I was attending the informational sessions from both GirlScouts and Scouts while trying to make the call for our daughter and the tone shift was jarring, where GirlScouts it was all “we’re going to sell cookies and learn important things you need to know as a girl” and became honestly kinda sexist and just tried to badmouth Scouts when I asked how it compares. Meanwhile Scouts it was just “look we’re going to go hiking and camping and make a race car to race and have fun!” (and had the exact same answer when I asked how Scouts compares to GirlScouts)
So yeah we ultimately went with the more inclusive option that didn’t recoil at the idea of her wanting her brother who she adores to join and didn’t turn to badmouthing the alternative when asked how they compare. And guess what, she’s having a blast and it feels weird that it was ever a gendered thing in the first place!
Especially when the maintainer gets upset about answering the same questions repeatedly in Discord but doesn’t offer a non-discord support stream
Scouts does do a really good job of preparing kids for the military if they so choose. Many of the hard and soft skills it teaches are very military-esque. Or put another way, I was chatting with another parent who’s oldest just joined the military at 18 and they said the training is just like scouts and credited scouts with preparing them well for the military
You don’t have to be a little person to weigh 123lbs, just skinny. I’m average height and have always been super boney and the only way I’ve ever been able to gain weight was by working out. I weighed about 125ish almost my entire adult life, and only in the last couple of years as I became able to bike 100 miles a week did I squeak past 130
With halfway decent management Sears was in a good position to continue holding a massive and controlling portion of the American household market, the problem is they had inept owners managing the company who managed to snatch bankruptcy from the jaws of success
It doesn’t help that it was owned by a hedge fund that made bank on Sears’ demise such as by saddling Sears with a ton of debt, 40% of which was owned by Sears’ parent company
I just want to put out there, along with all of his other crimes, I have a personal gripe with Dick Cheney. Around 2005 I had a flight connection in Chicago and so did he. The entire airport ground to a halt so that his plane could take off but it stopped and sat for 20 minutes on the runway delaying the entire O’Hare airport. After Air Force 2 took off there was a mad dash to catch up after the forced half hour pause, and my luggage never made it onto my connecting flight and took 3 days to get to me at my destination! Fuck you Dick Cheney! You caused my luggage to get lost 20 years ago!
I mean the mismanagement didn’t help at all. Forcing different departments to compete with each other, some departments spinning up redundant support teams that were exclusive to their department, etc.
There’s still a handful of franchises which retained the naming rights post-bankruptcy too!
Holy shit I was not prepared to see a dude fall to his death. I thought for sure it was just a glitz reel filmed the day before his failed attempt at flying
Look on the bright side, as a free person with a job your tax dollars also help the local library provide books, services and many other things to your local community!
Prison healthcare in the US is super poor and often in violation of local or international laws. Basically most preventative care isn’t provided, testing for severe concerns is often put off for months or even years, and any kind of regular care required is frequently delayed.
See John Oliver and Deviant Ollam’s Cara updates (I can’t find the exact one but they freaking made her even more disabled by failing to replace her catheter and if I remember correctly either using an incorrect catheter or incorrectly installing the catheter)
For those unaware of the difference, everyone in prison has been found guilty and sentenced for a crime, jail is typically where people are incarcerated before being tried and/or sentenced.
An officer can literally arrest you on whatever charges they might make up on the spot and take you to jail, and depending on a number of specifics you may simply not have many options to leave jail before your trial which is often many months later. I think there’s some form of protection against this sometimes but I’m not well versed enough on the subject to know for sure and make a general statement
Knew a guy who tried to drive through a snowdrift, totalled his car due to the ice buried in the snow
Damn that was good! I’ll have to read some of the author’s other works
I worked in retail for 3 years, I lasted a single night working at a warehouse
I have a kid with L3 Autism, and let me tell ya, each individual cost might be painful but workable but they add up fast
He started speech therapy in November, the only therapy office is in a smaller town 20 miles away. My wife, fortunately, was already not working so she is able to drive him to his twice a week appointments. They told us the cost would be about $90/month with our insurance. Not horrendous but our budget has been tight on one income. A month later I start seeing the bills hit our checking account, first one, then 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc. quickly draining our entire buffer in checking. I call up the therapy place and learn it doesn’t cost $100/month but $100/appointment. I say “that’s over $800 a month!” And they say “that’s why we bill per appointment and not per month!” Now, this is the cost until we hit the $2k individual deductible, except it’s already mid-December, I have to pay for the last month of appointments and I quickly calculate out that we won’t hit the deductible by the end of the year, and I’ll have to pay another $2k in Jan/Feb/March to reach the deductible when costs go down to only $19/appointment or about $250 per month
So I calculate it out, figure out we have enough in savings to pay for this if we completely drain it then pass nearly the entire tax return to this damn therapy place, and mind you, this is all happening during the 6-8 months it takes to process his Medicaid eligibility. So then they say “he needs a speech tablet” and refer me to a company where it costs $800. I look into it, it’s literally an iPad with an app loaded which has buttons to do speech synthesis using the iOS speech synthesis API. I identified that every app available either costs a horrendous amount up front or is a rediculous license cost per month. You no pay, your kid no longer has a voice and will probably act out more because they can’t communicate their needs.
While this is all going down and I’m watching my entire savings drain away, my financial goals get set back yet another 2 years or more, he starts escaping his crib at night and beating up his sister (including a couple of times throwing a lamp at her because he wanted it on and she wanted it off so she could sleep), because that’s how it goes with autistic kids sometimes. So I start looking into specialty beds that will act as a restraint. Y’know how much those cost? There’s a sketchy looking company that sells some that look like coffins for around $2-4k or there’s nicer ones starting at about $15k (and apparently some kids manage to completely ruin them within a year with their stimming!) so at this point I’m starting to slide into depression as I realize I’m not going to get to spend any money on fun stuff for several years while I pay for every fun new expense of having an L3 autistic kid, I saw my goals for my 30s quickly slide into my 40s or 50s.
Now the happy part! He ended up qualifying for Medicaid because for kids since they have no income they immediately qualify with an L3 Autism diagnosis. Medicaid fully paid for the therapy appointments, backdated by 3 months so it cost a couple thousand less than I had projected. I found an open source project for a web server which provides the exact same features as those $25/month speech tablet apps (and my plan was to learn Android packaging and turn it into an app to load onto a used Android tablet, a cost of about $100) and Medicaid ultimately bought the $800 tablet for him. My wife learned from a parent group on Facebook that you can get mosquito nets for like $30 on Amazon that will work as a restraint by simply putting a zip tie through the zipper so they can’t unzip it at night. He also got signed up for a special Medicaid expansion that exists in my state which covers all sorts of random expenses of having a disabled child, such as door alarms, fridge locks, cameras, a fence, etc. should your kid be a flight risk like mine was (we ended up not needing nearly as much from them but I’m happy the option exists at all!) ultimately I got insanely lucky with the timing of everything, and the chaos and expenses only ultimately set me back about 1 year on my financial goals. Oh also he ended up not using the speech tablet at all after we got it and started talking (and now is about caught up with his age level for speech!) so there’s that too.
Anyways the point is, someone can look at a $2k expense for specialized medical equipment and go “nah bro, that ain’t that expensive!” But that $2k is probably coming after lots of other big expenses that drain even a well-funded emergency fund, and of course one’s improved quality of life is gated behind that $2k expense that they’re going to struggle to afford. And that’s assuming the disability that put them in the market for this thing doesn’t affect their ability to work, which it almost definitely does! Every person with a disability has a story like mine of this industry that exists to extract money from Medicaid and when Medicaid wisens up to being overbilled for something and drops coverage for a given thing, the companies just offer financing and leave the prices just as sky high, because what else will you do but pay up?
In the time since I last watched that movie, I’ve accidentally started living it, except I work remotely so it all sucks way less
That’s also about what I saw at an MSP I briefly worked at, about 2000 managed PCs, and about 200 new managed PCs per year being prepared and deployed
And for anyone who doesn’t know, you can experience Runescape as it was in its heyday via 2009scape!
The best part is, they offer XP multipliers (by default you can select 1x, 2.5x or 5x XP in case you have a job and responsibilities) its also a super active project with a brilliantly healthy official server to play on, and completely free to play with optional singleplayer!